‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ was originally the name of an anonymous fourteenth-century English poem about a cruel woman, but the title ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is more commonly associated with John Keats’s poem which tells the story of a knight-at-arms who was seduced by a woman who was […]
‘The Little Black Boy’ is a poem from William Blake’s 1789 volume Songs of Innocence. Before we proceed to an analysis of Blake’s poem, here’s a reminder of ‘The Little Black Boy’. The Little Black Boy My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! […]
William Wordsworth’s great long autobiographical poem in blank verse, The Prelude, has many great passages, and this is one of the best, from the first book of the poem, describing the poet’s schooldays and his time among nature. The description of the hill looming up as a young Wordsworth rows […]